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5 Tools to Battle Social Media Content Overload

This is a guest blog post by Leo Widrich, co-founder of Buffer, a Twitter publishing application. He writes Twitter Tips every week on his blog.

When Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg announced last year that we will be sharing twice the amount of content from just 12 months ago, there were some very interesting responses. Nova Spivack mentioned that this will cause a Sharepocalypse to happen.

Finding the right filters to optimize both sharing and consuming content is one of the most important ways of dealing with this information overload.

The current landscape of tools available to you is abundant, so let's narrow it down to 5 awesome tools that will help you battle social media content overload. This way, you can identify the top content, trends, and important news in your network and industry to stay in the know and ahead of the competition.

This tool allows you to connect your Twitter, Facebook, and Google account to feed it with the most popular stories in your network. The app picks the most valuable ones for you and gives you a digest of the top stories delivered via email, the web, or mobile. Users can customize the frequency by which they'd like to receive their digest (from once daily up to 4 times daily) as well as the number of stories highlighted per digest.

The suggestions are top notch, as the algorithm has been refined a lot in recent months to show top stories that suite your preferences well.

Bonus: You can now also “request stories on demand” with a new button whenever you need another dose of great stories.

This tool gives you an easy way to master the sharing side of things. Whenever you find an article you like, simply click the Buffer browser plugin icon, and it will be added to your queue of tweets or Facebook posts. Buffer will "automagically" share it for you at a more optimized time as well as space out your shares throughout the day.

Spend a few minutes every morning to source your Twitter stream for the best articles that you can add to your Buffer account to be shared throughout that day. There's no hassle of scheduling involved, and doing so will help you build relationships with industry bloggers and thought leaders and make for an engaging and valuable Twitter feed.

Bonus: Now you can even Buffer your retweets right from Twitter.com if you have the Chrome, Safari, or Firefox extension installed.

An app that I've only recently discovered is SocialBro. It is a fantastic helper to understand your Twitter followers much better so you can offer them the right content. For example, you can click to see which countries your followers are from, what languages they speak, and identify their activity on Twitter.

It also offers a great analysis of the best tweeting times, based on when your followers are online the most.

Bonus: The app also gives you a list of your most engaged followers, so you can interact with them in a much more focused, targeted, and personalized way.

This is the latest social media dashboard app from Nova Spivack, who wants to help you deal with the aspects of the Sharepocalypse. With Bottlenose, you have a great new way to activate monitoring functions that will only surface certain tweets and Facebook posts for you.

What's great about Bottlenose is that you can save your filters and create a whole new social stream that is much less cluttered and has a much higher quality rate.

Bonus: Be sure to check out the “sonar” map that allows you to visually see which topics you and your followers are talking about the most.